The Killing Season by Robert Cowley

The Killing Season: The Autumn of 1914, Ypres, and the Afternoon That Cost Germany a War

By Robert Cowley

Random House 2025

While the subtitle of his book is busy doing what subtitles so regularly tend to do, in this case hysterical over-claiming (there was no single afternoon that cost Germany a war, this one or any other), military historian Robert Cowley is busy presenting readers with one of the sharpest, most compendiously authoritative histories of the First Battle of Ypres in the autumn of 1914, which cost tens of thousands of lives and largely changed the nature of the war from traditionally active to the grueling trench-bound slogging match that’s become synonymous with the First World War in the popular imagination. In The Killing Season, Cowley looks at the causes and development of that first Flanders campaign, drawing on a huge number of primary and secondary sources (readers will have to calculate the exact number themselves, since, inexcusably, the book has no bibliography) in four or five different languages in order to construct a picture of the early stages of the war that’s both pleasingly argumentative (the serial discussions in the End Notes are not to be missed) and powerfully evocative.

When Cowley is writing about those sources, he is often as dramatic as he is evaluative, as when he refers to the letter a certain Captain Dillon wrote to his sister as “one of the most unforgettable documents of the Great War on the Western Front:

When it appeared in a local newspaper, Dillon’s account must have had the effect – though through words – that Alexander Gardner’s photographs of Union and Confederate corpse at Antietam had for Civil War-era Americans. In a few flicks of the eye, the nobility of the war vanished. Eternity could not have been more empty of life and redemption than those corpses. God was dying on our watch.

In addition to the always-querying End Notes, the book also features fascinating footnotes, where Cowley provides a running commentary on the people and events he’s chronicling, like this quick observation on the commander of the German forces, Erich von Falkenhayn:

The greatest enigma of this period has to be Falkenhayn himself. The German commander in chief was not a person who felt comfortable confiding in others. His secret ruminations remained secret … Unfortunately for history, Falkenhayn died a relatively young sixty-one in 1922. Except for his bare-bones memoir, he remained silent to the end.

“No one had planned for no-man’s-land,” Cowley writes. “A spontaneous creation, it had grown into the ash heap of siege craft, an impenetrable membrane of lethal indifference, the province of rats, midnight wiring parties, snipers, and the dead.” Thanks to the fullness of diaries and letters included in these pages (along with a very good selection of photos), that grim, dirty new reality, the signature of Ypres and the narrative focal point of the latter half of The Killing Season, feels appallingly real.

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News